by Andre Dubus
“It’s my son,” she said. “I’ll see what he wants.”
“Call him over,” one said, and Joan saw another motioning her to silence, and so she knew that what was in her heart had reached her face too. Richie. It’s Richie, seeing him dead under a bent bicycle. She was walking toward Larry and he came to her and they stood between the wall and the room of tables covered for tomorrow.
“Is anything wrong?”
“Yes. I need to talk.”
“Is anything wrong. With somebody.”
“No. No, everybody’s fine.”
“Thank God. I thought something had happened.”
“Something did. But everybody’s well.”
“Good. Then let’s hear about it.”
She saw Richie in his bed, with whatever he dreamed; now she knew the trouble was love and she felt the hammock again, lifting her, and she sank into its idle swing. She could hear about love from there, without a sigh or the tensing of a muscle. She led him to an empty table opposite the end of the bar, near the television turned to a Red Sox game but without sound, and two empty tables away from her friends, and she seated him with his back to the women, to protect his face.
“Dad called me to the house last night.”
“Don’t you want a drink?”
“Yes. What’s that?”
“Vodka and tonic.”
“I’ll have one.”
She stood, and he reached out a hand that fell short of hers, and said: “Wait. Let me—”
“—Relax, and have a drink. I thought you’d come from the morgue.”
She got the drinks from young handsome black-bearded Lee at the bar, and he shook his head at her money. Larry was smoking and staring at the silent ballgame. She sat and he lit her cigarette and said: “Dad and Brenda have been seeing each other. Now they’re getting married.”
She leaned back in her chair, and studied his face.
“Well,” she said, and she saw Greg, foolish and wild, and angry and sweet, both too much and not enough of him to live in the world, let alone with one woman; at least by the time he burned out Brenda he would be nearly dead. “What about you?”
“I’m going fucking nuts. Excuse me. I’m going nuts.”
“Don’t. At least he didn’t take her from you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You left her or you lost her. That’s all. Nothing else matters.”
“My father marrying her matters.”
“Of course it does. It stinks.”
“It’s even against the law,” he said, and he looked down at his drink, as though ducking his petulance.
“What law?”
“Massachusetts.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. But it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Listen: your father has always been a son of a bitch. That’s one reason I loved him for so long.”
“Why?”
“Because he never wants to be one. It was exciting, watching him struggle.”
“How long would you have stayed? If it weren’t for Richie. The accident.”
“Richie was no accident.”
“Really? You were—” He closed his eyes, his lips quietly counting. “Thirty-five.”
“Your father thought it would save us.”
“Did you?”
“He could always talk me into things.”
“I told him last night I wasn’t coming home again. Or to work either.”
She nodded, watching him. You knew so much about your children; too much. They changed so little from infancy that, if you dared, you could come very near predicting their lives by the time they started school. At least the important parts: Richie had always been solitary and at peace with it; Carol had wanted happiness whose source was being loved, and she had looked for it with each new friend, had changed her child’s play and dress and even speech with these friends, and had never looked for it by doing something she loved, or even doing nothing at all, in her own solitude; and Larry, the one with talents, with real gifts, had always waited for someone—a friend, his family, a teacher—to see those gifts and encourage him. He could no more leave his father now than he could have twenty years ago.
“What do you think?” he said.
“I understand. But I don’t think you will.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll only break your heart, and Richie’s, and your father’s.”
“Not yours?”
“I live here now. You can’t work at the stores? Really?”
“No.”
“But you don’t hate him.”
“No.”
“You’re just hurt.”
“Just.”
“Want another?”
“All right.”
Lee refused her money again, and she thanked him with the freedom she had earned: very early, on this job, she had let men know that she did not want a lover. She had done it with subtlety and, if that wasn’t clear, with kindness; and she accepted free drinks because she was a worker there, and a good one.
“I love this time of night,” she said to Larry. “You should come in more often, about now.”
“Maybe I will.”
“We have fun. What about you? Do you have fun?”
“When I’m working.”
“At the stores? Or performing?”
“Dancing. Acting. Are you coming next week?”
“Yes. Somebody’s working for me. Listen: can I tell you something?”
“After last night, anybody can tell me anything.”
“You’re a good dancer, a good actor. I’ve seen you, and I know. I don’t have the training to judge like a professional. But I feel it. But you only want to be a performer. Then you wait for it to happen. You don’t go after it. You let too much get taken from you. You wait too much for things to happen. You think too Goddamn much.”
“Jesus.”
“You know it’s true. I’m not trying to hurt you. I want to tell you something.”
“What’s that got to do with Dad marrying my Goddamn ex-wife?”
“Look at you. You can’t even sound angry when you say that. I think some artists would be set free by all this. No more father, no more job, no ex-wife in the same town. They’d use this like a train to take them away. New York; wherever. Just throw themselves at the world: here I am. What makes me feel so—what gives me pain about you is that you won’t. So sometimes I think you got just enough of a gift to be a curse, and not enough to be a blessing. You share that with your father.”
“What’s his gift?”
“The second part: here I am, world. And the world always sees him. But there’s no talent to see. Only the energy, the drive.”
“You’re sure I won’t leave?”
“Yes.”
“Me too. I guess that’s why I came to see my mommy.”
Then he pushed back his chair, started to rise, but she reached across the table and held his wrist till he eased into the chair and slid it forward.
“Stay a while,” she said. “Let’s talk.”
“All right.”
“I’m going to keep you here till you smile.”
“What time do they close?”
“Time enough. I’ll tell you something you don’t have to believe tonight, or for a long time. You’ll keep working for your father and, after a while, it’ll be all right. You’ll see him at the store, and you won’t think of him with Brenda. There might be a twitch, like some old injury that reminds you it was there. But you won’t see the pictures. You probably feel that twitch whenever you see your father anyway, because you’ve always fought, you two, and you’ve always loved each other.” He nodded, and she saw, so joyfully that she had to force her words to be slow and calm, that he was listening, truly listening, and how many times had she ever been able to tell one of her children something she knew, and to help the child? So much of motherhood was casting lines to children beyond reach, that she could count with less than two digits the times their hands had clutche
d the rope and pulled. “Finally, at the store, it’ll be the same. You’ll go get Richie the way I do, sitting in the car, tooting the horn, and you’ll bring him to my place for dinner. I’ll get a third chair for the table. Then one evening your father will come out to the car while Richie’s still inside. He’ll look sinful as a scolded boy, and he’ll ask you in for a beer. You’ll want to curse or cry, but you’ll go have the beer instead, and Brenda won’t be in the house. Because he will be planning this, because he loves you. You’ll just pass the time of day over your beer, and you’ll have a second, and when you leave with Richie he’ll offer you his hand. You’ll shake it. One day after work he’ll take you out for drinks and dinner. He’ll show up at a play or a dance concert, just him and Richie, and afterward they’ll take you someplace for a beer. He’ll invite you to Sunday dinner, and you’ll go, and everyone will have tense stomachs and be very polite, and Brenda won’t kiss or touch your father, but she’ll kiss you hello and goodbye. Soon you’ll be dropping in and someday it won’t even hurt anymore. You and your father will be able to laugh and fight again. Everyone will survive. I told you I’d make you smile.”
“Was I?”
“You have tears in your eyes. But there was a smile.”
“You know why?”
“No.”
“Because I knew all that. When I heard it, I knew I had known it since I woke up this morning.”
“Good. You know why I like my waitress friends so much? And what I learned from them? They don’t have delusions. So when I’m alone at night—and I love it, Larry—I look out my window, and it comes to me: we don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got. You’re smiling again.”
“Tears too.”
“Wipe them fast, before my friends think something terrible is happening.”
IX
AT TEN O’CLOCK Richie’s father phoned to say he was still at Carol’s and would be home around midnight.
“Are you all right?” his father said.
“Sure.”
“Are you going to bed now?”
“After a while.”
He put the phone back on the receiver on the kitchen wall and looked at it, then at the clock on the stove. He went down the stairs to his room and took his key ring with the keys to his bicycle lock and the front door and back door; he was passing the open bathroom when he stopped and looked at Jim Rice over the toilet with its raised seat. He went in and brushed his teeth, and his rump tightened against the danger of the bristles and the flavor in his mouth, and his careful brushing of his hair, and tucking in and smoothing of his shirt. He started to pray Lead us not into temptation but stopped at Lead and hurried out of the house, leaving on lights for his coming back.
Houses were lighted, and leaves of trees near the streetlight, but beneath him the grass was dark and he walked carefully, like a stranger on his lawn. Then he was on the road under the trees, and he could see objects now, distinct in the darkness: shrubs and flowers, and mailboxes near doors, and above him the limbs of trees. He watched the trees where that morning they had talked; then the blacktop ended, and clumsily he stepped through weeds and in and out of ruts, and started to sweat in the warm, close air whose density made him feel he moved through smoke he could neither see nor smell nor taste. He did not risk stumbling loudly through the trees, approaching her like someone frightening or, worse, an awkward boy. He looked up at the treetops against the stars and sky, then left the trail, and went around the trees and stood beside them, in their shadows, and looked at the infield through the backstop screen, and scanned the outfield.
First he saw Conroy, the dog, a blond motion, then a halted silhouette in left center field. He looked to both of Conroy’s sides, saw only the expanse of dark grass and the woods past the outfield. Then he stepped out of the shadows, stood in the open, and peered down the edge of the trees. He saw the brightening glow of her cigarette, then it moved down and away from the small figure that was Melissa, profiled, sitting on the ground. Above her, cicadas sang in the trees. At once he moved and spoke her name. Her face jerked toward him, and he said: It’s Richie; then he was there, standing above her, looking down at her forehead and her eyes. He could not see their green. He sat beside her, crossed his legs like hers.
“I didn’t think you’d still be here,” he said.
“Is that why you came late?”
“No. I had to wait for my Dad to call.”
“Where is he?”
“Visiting my sister in Boston.”
“Can you see Conroy?”
He looked at left field.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Straight that way.”
He pointed his right arm and she touched it with her cheek, sighting down it. Slowly he tightened his bicep so her face would feel its muscles.
“I don’t want him in those woods. Once he went in there and wouldn’t come out for an hour.”
“Look where my finger is.”
“Okay, I see him.”
“I think he’s coming this way.”
“He is.”
She drew on her cigarette, then tossed it arcing in front of them, and he watched it burn in the grass. He could see its thin smoke, but he could still not see the color of her eyes. She wore the cutoff jeans from this morning and the blue denim shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and the shirttails knotted in front; her skin looked darker.
He had not noticed her shifting, but she had, when she looked down his arm, and now her knee still touched his, and her left arm his right, till one of them moved; and her shoulder rubbed his or rested against it. Beneath the sound of cicadas, his breath was too quick, audible; he tried to slow it, held it for moments after inhaling, and breathed through his nose.
“Why did you have to wait for your father to call?”
“He wanted me to. So I’d know when he’d be home.”
“Oh. I thought maybe she was sick or something. Your sister.”
“No.”
“He sounds nice.”
“My dad?”
“Yes.”
“I hope so.”
“That’s a funny thing to say.”
He nodded. In her eyes now was a shade of green. Except for tobacco smoke and lipstick, her scents had faded since morning: the cologne or cosmetic was gone. Her clothes and skin too, morning-fresh when she had kissed him, held the smells of the day: its long hot sunlit air, and the restful and pleasant odor of female sweat.
“Why did you say it?”
“Because I want him to be.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
He was watching her mouth, and he swallowed, and knew he was lost. If only he could be lost without fear. If only his heart could keep growing larger and larger until he had to hold her, else it would burst through his ribs, if only he could look to the stars—and he did: abruptly lifted his face to the sky—and find in them release from what he felt now, or release to feel it. He looked at her eyes, her nose, her lips.
“You know,” she said. “What you told me this morning, that you’d tell me sometime.”
“Last night—”
“Go on,” she said. “Last night.”
“My brother came over, to see my dad. He’s twenty-five, and I was in bed. But I got up to tell him hello. I was on the stairs going up to the kitchen, but then I heard what they were saying. So I just stayed and listened. After a while I went back to my room.
It’s under the living room, and they were right over me, so I heard it all.”
He lay on his back. Then she was beside him, her arm touching his, and he slid his hand under her palm. Slowly and gently he squeezed, and her fingers pressed. When he found that he was trembling, he did not care. He watched the stars, and talked. When he paused after telling her of that morning, of his father’s tears he never saw, she said: “You poor guy.”
He did not correct her. But he did not feel tha
t way at all. He did not even have to control his voice, for there were no tears in it, nor in his breast. What he felt was the night air starting to cool, and the dew on the grass under his hand holding Melissa’s, and under his arms and head and shirt, and only its coolness touching his thick jeans, and the heels of his shoes. He felt Melissa’s hand in his, and the beating of his heart she both quickened and soothed, and he smelled the length of her beside him, and heard in the trees the song of cicadas like the distant ringing of a thousand tambourines. He saw in the stars the eyes of God too, and was grateful for them, as he was for the night and the girl he loved. He lay on the grass and the soft summer earth, holding Melissa’s hand, and talking to the stars.
PART VII
TOWNIES
THE CAMPUS SECURITY guard found her. She wore a parka and she lay on the footbridge over the pond. Her left cheek lay on the frozen snow. The college was a small one, he was the only guard on duty, and in winter he made his rounds in the car. But partly because he was sleepy in the heated car, and mostly because he wanted to get out of the car and walk in the cold dry air, wanted a pleasurable solitude within the imposed solitude of his job, he had gone to the bridge.
He was sixty-one years old, a tall broad man, his shoulders slumped and he was wide in the hips and he walked with his toes pointed outward, with a long stride which appeared slow. His body, whether at rest or in motion, seemed the result of sixty-one years of erosion, as though all his life he had been acted upon and, with just enough struggle to keep going, he had conceded; fifty years earlier he would have sat quietly at the rear of a classroom, scraped dirt with his shoe on the periphery of a playground. In a way, he was the best man to find her. He was not excitable, he was not given to anger, he was not a man of action: when he realized the girl was dead he did not think immediately of what he ought to do, of what acts and words his uniform and wages required of him. He did not think of phoning the police. He knelt on the snow, so close to her that his knee touched her shoulder, and he stroked her cold cheek, her cold blonde hair.